Systematic Phonological Variation in a Trilingual Community: Evidence from Hong Kong

Hong Kong is a trilingual community, in which Cantonese, a Chinese dialect, is a vernacular; English is the second language; and Putonghua is the standard spoken Chinese. This study investigated the phonological variation of syllable-initial /n-/ in these three language varieties spoken by Hong Kong students. This cross-linguistic study filled the gap of previous sociolinguistic research which focused on monolingual variation. In this study, the speech data were collected from Hong Kong students who completed six oral tasks of different speech styles in each of the three language varieties. The results indicate despite the fact that the degree of the substitution of /n-/ by /l-/ differs in the three language varieties, the phonological variation of /n-/ in these three varieties is constrained by the same sociolinguistic variables, to a similar extent. This study provides us with evidence to prove that systematic language variation exists in a speech community.